Notes on Screen Time
The Cap Times spoke with three University of Wisconsin-Madison experts for their perspectives on how parents should navigate screen time questions with children.
B. Bradford Brown, a professor of human development in the Department of Educational Psychology, studies adolescent peer relationships and youth social media use. Brown advised that children under 3 should limit screen time to little to none, while older children can have more.
“(Between ages) 3 to 8 … it really isn’t as much a question of quantity as quality, except that the more limited the screen time is, the more likely young people are to engage in more productive activities,” he said.
Brown said younger kids can benefit from certain educational information online. For example, if a child doesn’t have access to resources like museums, they can use screens as an alternative.
While he believes youth should be allowed to use social media to connect with peers, he emphasized that life online is very different from real life, and kids may have a hard time distinguishing the differences.
“There are some potential bad effects that are not that much different as well, because if we’re constantly viewing other individuals’ projection of themselves, and not recognizing that those are highly selective, stylized projections,” he said.
